Opening Event: City of Dreams & Along the Migrant Trails

Join the HHRC at the Michael Klahr Center on the campus of UMA on Friday, February 9, from 5pm to 7pm for the opening of two imaginative and charged exhibits: City of Dreams and Along the Migrant Trails. A special program featuring collaborators on both exhibits will take place at 5:30pm.

City of Dreams: Re-imagining Our Cities of the Future presents the quirky and imaginative found-object collage cityscapes of Maine artist Wally Warren alongside the research maps of Princeton, New Jersey’s Climate Central depicting the impact of sea-level rise on cities along the northeastern seaboard: Portland, Boston, and New York. Warren’s rich and colorful landscapes and Climate Central’s jarring projections bring the beauty of an imaginary artistic present into comparison with a foreboding environmental future.

The HHRC is also proud to open Along the Migrant Trails: Documenting the ‘Decade of Death’ Along the Arizona/Mexico Border, a heart-wrenching tribute to the migrants who travel the Arizona borderlands in the hope of finding work and a new life in the United States. Since 1998, members of volunteer humanitarian groups who scour the desert have been collecting artifacts, leaving water and food for migrants, and working to help all those that they can. During that time, they have also discovered the remains of nearly 3,000 people who perished in the desert. Thanks to a partnership with the Wilson Center at UMaine, the Tucson Samaritans, No Mas Muertes, artist Deborah McCullough, and UMaine PhD student Sara Lowden, ‘Along the Migrant Trails’ features some of these found artifacts and brings a powerfully personal view to an issue that seems removed from most Mainers’ everyday lives.